Role of women in comic books has transformed over the years

Sunday

Jan 27, 2008 at 12:01 AMJan 27, 2008 at 3:20 PM

The role of women in comic books has often involved playing the victim, while strong females are few and far between. The Drawn to Diversity program has explored minorities in the genre for several years and noted the transformation that characters such as Wonder Woman have undergone since their creation.

Bob Clark

A program at an Upstate New York college has taken a look at the changing role of females in comic books, noting the transformation that characters such as Wonder Woman have undergone since their creation.

Drawn to Diversity, a program of Alfred University, examines cultural diversity and stereotypes in comic books, newspaper comic strips and advertising cartoons.

“We want people to be more cognizant of what they see,” said Mechele Romanchock, coordinator of the university’s diversity programs.

Romanchock and Dan Napolitano, student activities director, prepared a presentation for a Women's Studies Roundtable on Friday, drawing from material they have been gathering for the past two years.

“Originally, we focused on diversity in comic books in general,” Napolitano said. “This is the first time we’ve pulled out all of the stuff on women.”

The most popular female comic book character — Wonder Woman — is a good example of the ways women have been portrayed in comic books since her inception in December 1941, Napolitano said.

“Wonder Woman is going to be a reference of society,” he said.

Many changes occurred to Wonder Woman over the years, Romanchock said, even trading in her tube-top shirt and short shorts for a white pantsuit in the 1970s, a move criticized by feminist Gloria Steinem, the publisher of Ms., who used the return of a strong Wonder Woman as the cover of her first issue.

The reason why Wonder Woman continued to endure was her strength, wits — and competition from weak and poorly developed female characters — Romanchock said.

“You have to take a look at her contemporaries,” she said. “You had things like ‘Millie the Model,’ ‘Nellie the Nurse’ and ‘Tessie the Typist.’”

“It referenced the jobs women could have at the time,” Romanchock added, saying the title characters of those comics were depicted as naive women with silly problems. “(‘Millie the Model’) was the stereotypical blonde bimbo.”

The markets for comic books have changed the way women are depicted.

“During World War II, comic books were read by about 75 percent of the population,” Romanchock said, adding readership dropped off after the end of the war, forcing companies to begin publishing violent crime comics and story lines about ghosts and other supernatural creatures to draw in a predominantly male audience.

“The women were usually just the victim,” she said, adding women were also extensively objectified as sexual objects.

As a result of the increases in violent and sexual content in comic books, Napolitano said, major reforms were undertaken in the 1950s, including the adoption of the Comics Code Authority in 1954 to self-regulate the industry.

According to Romanchock, the CCA code helped promote women in stronger roles, like DC Comics’ Supergirl, who went to college, held a job and was as strong in every way as her cousin, Superman.

Over time, several strong female characters came to comic books, like Storm from the “X-Men” comic books, but some comic books continued to use women as victims, such as those from “Luke Cage: Hero for Hire.”

“It’s feeding into stereotypes and negating women,” Romanchock said, adding change was on the horizon in the 1980s with a backlash against feminism and darker characters and storylines in comic books.

“You started seeing a trend towards darker characters,” she said, adding female characters also started to become more violent.

Napolitano pointed out one strong female character from the 1980s, Elektra, a Marvel Comics assassin who is the second-most lethal character ever created by the company.

In the 1990s and 2000s, an increase in independent comic book companies, many staffed by minorities and women, began changing the kinds of comics being printed and introducing more strong female characters, Napolitano said.

“The whole market is turning,” he said, adding more young girls now read comic books than boys.

The Evening Tribune

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